But poverty is endemic in Cambodia, particularly in Phnom Penh, where it's likely exaccerbated by rapid urban migration. The city is much more "raw" than either Bangkok or Saigon; it reminds me a little bit of Bangkok ten years ago, when the gritty underbelly of that city was more visible, before it was cemented over with shopping malls and hidden behind towering office buildings and new condo developments. Phnom Penh is notoriously not one of the safest cities in Asia for tourists -- the chances of falling victim to a pickpocket, snatch-and-grab bag thief, or even a mugger are higher here than elsewhere, and we met people who were unfortunate enough to have their belongings stolen from right in front of them. However, if one is cautious and sensible the risk is still minimal.
For tourists, there are several museums and other sites related to the Khmer Rouge's bloody history, such as the Genocide Museum mentioned above, and some of the 'Killing Fields'. [Adam visited the Genocide Museum but neither of us went out to the Killing Fields, partly in protest that the land has been sold to a Japanese corporation that is now charging a considerable entrance fee.] But Phnom Penh also has beautiful colonial architecture left from the French, and an enviable location at the confluence of three rivers. There is a good dining scene in Phnom Penh and cafe culture. It's a pleasant place just to spend some time relaxing and eating and observing life going by.
We treated ourselves to a sundowner at the Foreign Correspondents Club, which is still an extremely popular spot for expats and tourists to enjoy a beverage and watch the sun go down. Their happy hour prices are rediculously low and they make a mean martini. I had almost forgotten how much I like vodka ... I highly recommend it. We also had a great dinner at Friends, a restaurant in Phnom Penh run by the NGO of the same name (which also runs Makphet in Vientiane). The food is modern Cambodian fusion, with a tapas-style twist, as all the dishes are fairly small. Perfect for me and Adam, who thought that everything on the menu looked tasty. We ended up ordering 5 dishes for dinner, including a Cambodian curry, a noodle salad, Cambodian-style coleslaw, and sweet-potato fries with curry mayo. (I can't remember the 5th at the moment.) We couldn't resist ordering the banana & chocolate spring rolls with vanilla ice cream for desert, which may sound strange but were simply amazing. It was an incredible feast, and all for about $15 Cdn.
We enjoyed Phnom Penh, but quickly exhausted the list of things we wanted to do, and were eager to move on to the small towns of Kampot and Kep on Cambodia's south coast. Adam and I took another slow, local bus from Phnom Penh to Kampot -- it was a never-ending five-hour journey to reach a destination that was a mere 150 km away! But it was worth it when we arrived in the small, riverside town where there really isn't much of anything to do. We passed three days in Kampot doing little more than eating, drinking, reading and watching movies. Yes, movies -- our fabulous guesthouse (Mea Culpa) had a DVD player in the room, and in the middle of the day when it was unbearably hot outside, it was slothfully delicious to sit in an a/c room and watch a movie. In the mornings and late afternoons, when it was just slightly less hot outside, we went for walks along the river, bikes through the village on the other river bank, and one very pleasant cruise up the river to watch the world go by. Not too many tourists make it to this part of Cambodia, and it gets very rural very fast. It was quite scenic and relaxing; I enjoyed our time in Kampot very much. Although there wasn't a great dining scene in Kampot, Mea Culpa Guesthouse made up some of the best breakfasts we've had in a long time and Adam indulged in their pizzas, made in an authentic Italian wood-burning oven. There were also plenty of spots to sit by the river and drink a vodka-soda/tonic while watching the sun set across the river and behind Bokor mountain.
After three days in Kampot we moved on to Kep, an even smaller town (pop. around 3,000) about 30 km away. Kep is on the ocean, and before the Khmer Rouge came to power, it was a prosperous seaside resort town and port. But Kep was seen by the regime as terribly bourgeousie and most of the villas and other buildings were gutted or burned by the Khmer Rouge. Recently, Kep has been superseceded by Sihanoukville as the major port and beach destination in southern Cambodia, but it's making a comeback with locals and expats looking for a little waterfront R&R in a more tranquil setting than Sihanoukville can offer (which has perhaps become a victim of its own success; it has endured rapid [over]development recently and become a little crazy). Even fewer tourists make it to Kep than to Kampot, and there are limited services and restaurants around. But it was a very pleasant little spot to relax and see some of rural Cambodia. We stayed in a simple concrete bungalow set in a gorgeous garden at Botanica, and kept busy driving around with a rented a motorbike. Don't worry, Mom, it wasn't terribly dangerous given the lack of serious traffic. Adam drove, and although he was a bit tentative at first, he quickly got the hang of it, and miraculously, there were no accidents. We really enjoyed just driving around the very rural countryside, taking it all in. On one of our drives, we stopped at a pepper plantation and saw how pepper is grown - the trees are quite tall (about 10 feet) and resemble juniper bushes a little. Another day, we spent the morning at the local beach, reading and watching the locals float around in the water on inner tubes, most of them fully clothed. Few other tourists were in sight. We also enjoyed sunset drinks every day. For entertainment, instead of watching Animal Planet (a channel we've become slightly addicted to in Asia), we watched our very own reptile reality show take place in our bungalow, which we shared with several other creatures, including 3 tokay (giant geckos) and some tree frogs. At one point, we stumbled into a tokay vs. tree frog showdown in our bathroom. (We didn't have the patience to wait for the outcome of the standoff, so we don't know if the tokay ate the tree frog or if the frog lived to see another day.) After spending a great three days of doing nothing-much-in-particular in Kep, it was time to cross the border into Vietnam.But I must disgress a moment, to mention what another blogger has called "The Ambassadors of Hello". When we were out and about in rural Cambodia, it was not unusual for the local children to wave wildly at us and shout "hello", whether we were on a boat, bikes, or in a tuk-tuk. They were thrilled when we waved or shouted "hello" back, and sometimes, you could see them running to the road or the water's edge from quite a long away, just so that they could wave at us and say hello. It was incredibly endearing, and I was very happy to finally see children in Cambodia wanting to interact with us without wanting money from us. In Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, we were overwhelmed by children aggressively trying to sell us trinkets, books, water, and anything/everything else, or just begging for money. Of course, their parents or other adults put them up to it, and sadly they often benefit little from whatever money they manage to obtain. It's terribly disheartening to see children like that, particularly when you realize that most of them should be in school, but there's little that tourists can do that's meaningful to help. (Although Adam and I have made a point of patronizing restaurants and retail shops in SEA that are doing good works with street kids and providing fair trade for local artisans.) Needless to say, my heart was rather lightened when we met some children in Kampot and Kep leading more normal lives.
Back to our Cambodia-Vietnam border crossing ... The border was a mere 30km from Kep, but getting there and across was an "interesting" experience. It rates as one of the more complicated overland border crossings I've done, and there have been a number of dodgy border crossings in my life, one of which involved several hours in a holding cell, but that's a whole other story. From our guesthouse in Kep, we arranged for a motorized tuk-tuk (similar to a carriage pulled by a motorcycle) to take us to the border. It was a slow journey, but we travelled through some very scenic countryside, and the time passed quickly. We knew that the last few kilometers would be on a rough dirt road, but neither of us realized just how rough -- the potholes were big enough to swallow a car and I felt like I was getting a chiropratic adjustment every time we hit one. It didn't help that it had rained the night before, but mud wasn't the main problem. Eventually, when we had endured the rough road for as long as I though I could bear, the driver stopped and told us that this was where we got out. But, ... the border crossing was nowhere in sight! He tried to explain that xe oms (motorcycles with driver) were coming to pick us up and take us to the border. This did not please us terribly, as the arrangement and plan was that he would take us to the border, we would walk across, and then we would arrange onward transportation to the next town in Vietnam on the other side. Now we were stuck in the middle of nowhere with no transportation options and no choices. We had to use the xe oms he had arranged in order to get to the border, and we had to pay whatever we could manage to negotiate (which was unlikely to be a fair price). We were also terribly skeptical that our 3 large backpacks, including Adam's climbing gear, and our two smaller daypacks, plus ourselves, and the two drivers, could all fit onto two small motorcycles, but guess what? They did! It was quite a sight. Each motorcycle had a huge 90 litre backpack sandwiched between the driver and the handlebars, then either me or Adam on the back, with each of us wearing yet another backpack. (Adam had to wear/carry his 12kg climbing pack, which probably didn't feel so nice each time he hit a pothole.) It turned out to be several kilometers to the Cambodian checkpoint along an even worse road than what we had already come down. The motorcycles were zipping around and turning abruptly, trying to avoid potholes, yet sometimes slamming into bumps, and we were trying to hold on for dear life. While all this was going on, my driver was trying to have a conversation with me and we negotiated the fare for our journey! It was nothing less than crazy. But we got through the Cambodian checkpoint and the Vietnamese checkpoint, where it took an interminably long time for them to process our passports, and then finally drove to the town of Ha Tien, which is 8km inside the Vietnamese border. We had left Kep at 8 am and finally arrived in Ha Tien, about 38km away, about 3 hours later at 11am! We had no intention of staying in Ha Tien, and fortunately there was a mini-bus leaving for the town of Chau Doc (in the Mekong Delta) an hour later. The journey from Ha Tien to Chau Doc was uneventful, but not pleasant. Our mini-bus was so old and busted that it looked like it might fall apart during the journey. None of the seats were in one piece and we could even see the road through the floor! There was no air-conditioning but lots of air-flow. There were no chickens or other livestock on the bus, but it was a very local service stopping constantly to pick-up and drop-off passengers. Needless to say, we were the only tourists on board. When we arrived in Chau Doc several hours later, we and our bags were literally thrown out the door and onto the side of the road. We managed to negotiate a ride to our hotel from a cyclo (basically a bicycle pulling a carriage) and were very happy to collapse there.
Our adventures in the Mekong Delta started the next day. Most visitors to Vietnam see at least part of the famed Mekong Delta, but the great majority do so on a group tour from Saigon. Few tourists travel to and through the delta independently, but I'm not sure why, as it's rather easy to get around from town to town and to arrange your own river tours once you arrive. Tourists don't have to look very hard to try to find someone willing to take them out on the river, usually boat drivers find the tourists! It poured rain our first night in Chau Doc, so we didn't do much other than get some dinner and watch CNN & Animal Planet. It was an early night, since we planned to get up before 6am to get out onto the river shortly after dawn. All the travel guides recommend getting onto the river early, as it's busiest before 7am. It's so hot in the Mekong Delta that everyone is up and about bright and early, and then the towns shut down in the afternoon. By the time we got to the riverside shortly after 6am, there were lots of locals out drinking coffee, walking the promenade for exercise, and doing group aerobics or Tai Chi, something that is popular all through Vietnam. It wasn't long before a young boy came along and asked if we wanted to go out on the river. After some good natured bargaining, we got into his rowboat and were off for a 2-hour tour of the floating markets (more about those later), floating villages and a fish farm. It was a nice little tour, and we were done in time to catch our complimentary breakfast at the hotel -- pork noodle soup and really strong Vietnamese coffee. We had a whole day left to explore the small town of Chau Doc, and we wandered through the market and the small streets fairly aimlessly. We had coffee in plastic lawn chairs on the sidewalk with the locals and watched traffic go by. Children stopped to wave at us and say hello, and locals smiled when we waved and said "xin chao" (seen-chow) in response. And we bothered the very helpful and friendly staff at our hotel repeatedly with our questions of how-do-you-say-this and how-do-you-say-that in Vietnamese. The language is a tonal one, and the pronunciations extremely hard to figure out, but we were determined to give it a try.
After a very full day in Chau Doc, we took a much newer Mai Linh minibus to biggest city in the region, Can Tho. We arrived at a bus station about 5km from town and so had to use the services of xe oms (motorcycle taxis) once again in order to get to our hotel. The trip was not nearly as rough, given that we were travelling on well-paved city streets, but it was substantially more harrowing in city traffic. But both of us and all our baggage arrived safely. After getting settled, we headed out to the riverfront to try to meet some of the 'boat ladies' who do all-day trips to the floating markets on the Mekong. It wasn't hard ... if you walk around for more than a few minutes, you'll soon have people coming up to you saying, "You want boat trip?" But the locals who are trying to make a living this way are usually pleasant and polite, it's not a pushy or hard sell like some of the tuk-tuk drivers in Cambodia who harass you endlessly, even when it's obvious that no, you don't want a tuk-tuk. There's some friendly bargaining, but most of the boat drivers have a fixed price -- although this can range wildly from boat to boat. For example, a woman who based herself at our hotel wanted to take us on a boat tour for $30 USD, which for what is generally a 6-hour round-trip works out to about $6/hour. Other people offering boat tours on the riverfront were asking for $2/hour to $3/hour or more. We booked a trip with a very friendly woman who quoted us $2/hour upfront, no bargaining. (I appreciated that no-nonsense approach.) So it makes sense to shop around, especially because all of the small boats seemed to be more or less the same. There are bigger boats used by tour groups, which move faster and carry more people, but these boats cannot go into the middle of the floating markets the same way the smaller boats can, and of course, you share your day with a bunch of other tourists, rather than being the master of your own boat and going wherever you like for as long as you like. (You can guess that I'm not a fan of the big tour boats...)
Our trip on the Mekong started just before 5.30am the next morning. Although it was pitch black out, the city was already alive and there were lots of locals out, getting their day started. We cruised along the river in complete darkness at first, but we got to see dawn break while we were out on the river, and arrived at the first floating market, Cai Rang, right at 6am when it's busiest. A boat full of drinks pulled up to our little boat almost immediately, and Adam and I were able to buy steaming hot coffee, which really made our morning. Our driver, Sang, also took us to a boat selling food where we were able to buy some breakfast -- rice, pork and chilli. Sang plunged her little boat right into the middle of the mayhem, which at Cai Rang means both big and small boats. It's hard to explain (and so I really hope I can post some photos soon), but imagine a river full of boats of all sizes, laden with fruit and vegetables and ice and even housewares, where everyone is buying or selling. Sellers advertise what it is that they are selling by tying some of it to a bamboo pole sticking up from the boat. After cruising through Cai Rang for awhile, we continued down the river for another hour or two, until we arrived at the second market, which was made up exclusively of small boats, jammed together into a single thriving flotilla. Again, Sang thrust her little boat into the chaotic jumble, and we floated around in it for almost an hour, just gazing at the commerce taking place before us. I thought there might be order in the chaos, but no, I think it was just chaos. The boats smack each and move around each other like bumper cars, and most have old car tires tied to the sides for just that reason. It was an entirely unique experience. About mid-morning it was time to head back to Can Tho, and Sang took us back the long way, through the small, labyrinthine "back canals". It was incredibly scenic and we only saw one other tourist boat the entire time. We finally arrived back in Can Tho at 11am, 5 1/2 hours later. It was a fabulous trip. For me it was a highlight of our time in South-East Asia, but sitting on a wooden plank for that long was tough, and I don't know if my bum has ever been so sore! It was hard to believe that we had most of the day still ahead of us, although we didn't do much beyond eating, drinking coffee, and reading a good book. It was definitely an early night for us; we were totally exhausted from so much travel and so many early mornings in a row.
After 4 days in the Mekong Delta, we headed to Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon, as it's still referred to by most people, on March 4th. I think Adam's going to do a post on his impressions of this city. I was here 8 years ago, but it's all fresh and new for him. We've been here for 4 days, mostly eating some amazing local food, drinking fabulous coffee, and even doing a bit of sightseeing, when it's convenient to the eating and drinking. We fly to Hanoi tomorrow morning, and head out to Cat Ba Island in Ha Long Bay the next day. Although wifi is ubiquitous in Vietnam and internet cafes are cheap or free, but I can't seem to find a fast enough connection (or the requisite software) to post photos to the blog. I have my fingers crossed for Hanoi, otherwise the pictures might have to wait until we're home ... in a mere three weeks!
Cheers!
Robin
No comments:
Post a Comment